TERMITES (WHITE ANTS). 109 
with relation to certain nest or mound-building African species, constitutes the 
standard account, and that his illustrations are reproduced, with trivial variations, 
in most modern zoological textbooks and other popular narratives of White Ants and 
their fabrications. 
This remarkable hiatus in our knowledge of a very important insect group is 
fortunately on the eve of being filled in by the labours of several independent workers. 
Dr. J. D. Haviland, more especially, has in preparation the account of his recent 
extensive investigations of the Termitide of Singapore and South Africa, from which 
widely-separated regions he obtained no less than eighty-one distinct specific 
types, a magnificent addition to the small list of less than one hundred previously 
recorded species. Dr. Haviland was further fortunate in bringing certain of these 
forms alive to England, and produced a notable sensation by exhibiting them in 
conjunction with his preserved examples at one of the past year’s scientific meetings 
of the Linnean Society of London. A reference to Dr. Haviland’s original observations 
concerning certain of the species whose habits he investigated is included in a 
future page. 
The Termite fauna of Australia will probably prove on examination to be 
especially rich in the number and variety of its specific types. Little is attempted 
in this Chapter beyond the portraiture and a descriptive outline of the leading modifi- 
cations of the nest-mounds or termitaria of the species peculiar to the eastern, western 
and northern districts of the tropical regions of this Island-Continent. The systematic 
identification and classification of the Australian Termitide has been already commenced 
by Mr. W. W. Froggatt, of the Sydney Technological Museum, and as soon as his 
investigations are more advanced, it will be an easy matter to correlate the typical 
mound-forms figured in this volume with the technical nomenclature of the special 
White Ant types that build them. So far, as a preliminary instalment towards a 
comprehensive Monograph on this subject, Mr. Froggatt has contributed to the 
“Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales” for the year 1895 a paper 
which constitutes a general survey of the distribution of the hitherto known species 
and a special reference to a mound-constructing type distinctive of New South Wales. 
No technical name, however, is associated with either this or any other Australian 
specific forms that are less extensively referred to. The communication by the author 
to Mr. Froggatt of notes and sketches relating to the termitaria here figured has 
served only to elicit the fact that their constructors are apparently in all instances 
specifically new and undescribed, and await the appearance of Mr. Froggatt’s projected 
